1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a rotary head type digital magnetic recording/reproducing apparatus which is the so-called R-DAT or rotary head type digital audio tape recorder.
2. Prior Art
A magnetic head has an extremely narrow air gap through which information recorded on a magnetic storage medium is picked up. The air gap can often be jammed by dust or dirt causing difficulty in reading the information from the magnetic storage medium. An R-DAT employs the so-called interleave of two-track type, in which when one of two heads fails to normally operate due to head-jamming, the information lost may be recovered by a normally operating head through the interpolation process.
A similar problem may also occur in VTR in which the recording operation is performed by the use of rotary heads similar to that in R-DAT. The head trouble influences directly the quality of the picture on the screen, from which the user may become aware of the trouble.
In R-DAT, however, the audio signal can still be reproduced even if one of the two heads fails to normally operate, thus it is difficult for the user to become aware of the trouble of head. The failure of the head causes the degradation of tracking performance of the rotary head which leads to an increase in error rate; hence possibility of muting and degradation of sound quality. It is preferable that the users are alarmed of the trouble and are urged to clean the affected head.